‘I have studied the science of goodbyes,
in bare-headed laments of night.’
Osip Mandelstam, ‘Tristia’, 1918
*
what is left, when we have left,
what lustre spills into the air,
whose wraith disturbs the dust of memory
the ethereal descent into rocks and rivers,
earth’s benediction,
elemental
a thin wind feeds on grasses and herbs,
the valley statuesque,
the sky mute
*